Unofficial news and tips about Google

June 12, 2009

Yet Another Mobile iGoogle

Sometimes it's very difficult to understand Google: in 2008, Google released a great iGoogle interface optimized for iPhone, but it was discontinued one year later. "We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version," said a Google employee in January.

The regular mobile interface is very basic and it's only able to show feeds and a small number of gadgets. The mobile iGoogle doesn't have tabs and it's optimized for WAP phones, not for today's smartphones.

Google changed its and mind and decided to release a new iGoogle version for iPhone and Android phones. "This new version is faster and easier to use. It supports tabs as well as more of your favorite gadgets, including those built by third-party developers. (...) One of our favorite new features is the in-line display of articles for feed-based gadgets. That means you can read article summaries without leaving the page. You can also rearrange gadget order or keep your favorite gadgets open for your next visit."

To see the new version, visit iGoogle.com if you have an iPhone or an Android phone and click on "Try the new Mobile iGoogle". Google doesn't let you switch to the new version, so you need to bookmark the page. If you have a different phone with a WebKit browser, try to see if this page works well: http://www.google.com/m/ig?uipref=6.

This makes sense. It appears to be a move that once iGoogle Gadget developers play catch-up, you can have an iGoogle page that you can fully utilize on the iPhone as well, instead of just getting a few gadgets that partially appear on the iPhone.

But i hope it does eventually, because this one looks fantastic for placing in a sidebar. (when sidebars are eventually added for Chrome that is, but you can embed it in other browsers at the moment)

As a further improvement, it would be nice to select which tabs show in the first 3 slots by default (without having to re-arrange them in the regular page)You could have certain tabs you might want to view first over the ones you regularly view at a computer.

Working great on my Prē with webOS 1.1.0 on Bell, thanks for the tip! (And thank goodness it does, the WAP iGoogle page had always been basically useless, kept showing me weather for places I'd never added, losing the 'format search results for mobile' setting, etc.)